Found a site with quit the odd weapon for dueling. Look for the three pictures in the center of the collage.
http://www.alliancemartialarts.com/seminar-lansing.html
Anybody have some background on these?, I think it's safe to say they where made not for large scale battles.
I'm guessing they are for Judicial combat.
Chuck

Hi Chuck,
You're right, they are specialized weapons for judicial duels. You can see them in period manuscripts such as those from Hans Talhoffer or the Codex Wallerstein.

I've never seen anyone bouting with them before, though. That's pretty cool!

---

 Attachment: 87.51 KB
[ Download ]

By the way, they are often times shown with a mace or sword in hand as well, as in the pictures attached below.

---

 Attachment: 103.75 KB
[ Download ]

 Attachment: 89.06 KB
[ Download ]

Here're a couple of illustrations of variants of the shields. These are all from Talhoffer's 1459 fechtbuch, by the way.

---

 Attachment: 32.47 KB



 Attachment: 32.32 KB



 Attachment: 31.01 KB

These types of judicial dueling shields were featured in the BBC/History Channel production The Weapons that Made Britain. They were being discussed by Tobias Capwell of of The Kelvingrove Museum. Mike Loades briefly demonstrated how they may have been used in Trials of Combat with a couple short sequences.

They also look very, very suspiciously like the base model for the Elven shields at the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring (when the elves and men with Isildur fight Sauron), which when I saw that Weapons that Made Britain episode immediately hit me..... probably cause I'd watched FOTR the night before. :)

From what I saw of the show, they were just displaying all the various types of shields, and German dueling shields being an odder one, decided to show it.

Hey Bill, Mike Loades referenced Talhoffer throughout the entire show, saying there really weren't any surviving English manuals with the same material and from the same period.